Shale Gas: Halliburton’s Weapon of Mass Devastation

Workers step through the maze of hoses used at a remote fracking site being run by Halliburton.

Across the United States the exploitation of gas and oil from shale rocks using Halliburton’s hydraulic fracturing technology continues amid rising disasters. Unregulated drilling practices, rendered legal by the “Halliburton Loophole” engineered in 2005 by Vice President Dick Cheney, have had staggering health and environmental effects. Lured by the prospect of reducing oil dependence, President Obama has adopted an ambivalent approach, which ultimately yields ground to industry. With the same expectancy, countries all around the world have joined the shale-gas craze, arguing that if the U.S. has been “fracking” it must be safe. Energy independence would undoubtedly represent a game changing opportunity for many countries, but at what cost?

There is a global rush to embrace a new source of extracting hydrocarbons from the Earth. From Germany to Poland and France, from China and above all in the USA where the technique of hydraulic fracturing of shale rocks is most developed, governments and major oil companies are producing huge volumes of gas.

A number of energy importing countries around the world are planning a major investment in extracting natural gas from their shale rock formations. The most ambitious plans are coming from China and from Poland in the EU.

The US Government’s Department of Energy together with a Washington energy consultancy has just released a mammoth global report estimating resources of shale gas. Significantly, the report estimates that the largest untapped shale gas reserves worldwide lie in China. The study puts Poland and France at the top of the shale gas list in the EU. The rest of Europe they estimate simply lacks the geology where substantial shale rock is present.1

Even in Germany some cash-strapped states are seriously looking at Shale gas. ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company is planning major projects in the densely-populated North-Rhein Westphalia region. The company’s head for Central Europe, Gernot Kalkoffen in a recent interview stated, “Germany is most definitely an interesting market. We cannot achieve the energy strategy shift without gas.” ExxonMobil estimates shale gas is potentially available in six of Germany’s 16 states.2 The US Energy Department estimates that Germany could have some 8 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable shale gas, three years’ total consumption. Citizen protest groups and Parliamentary skepticism about health and safety of shale gas so far is braking a German shale gas bonanza.3 Not only ExxonMobil but also BASF’s Wintershall, Gaz de France, BNK Petroleum from the US and a daughter of Britain’s Royal Dutch Shell are salivating over German shale gas prospects.

The Polish government is in a state of near euphoria over the prospects of exploiting its shale gas resources. Prime Minister Donald Tusk calls shale gas Poland’s “great chance,” because it could cut its dependence on Russian gas, create tens of thousands of jobs and fill state coffers. In tests at one well in northern Poland done last August, the Polish Geological Institute claimed that Hydraulic fracturing didn’t affect the quality or quantity of surface and ground water and didn’t cause tremors that would pose a threat to buildings or other infrastructure. The US oilfield services giant Schlumberger did the fracking.4 Of course one test in one well is hardly conclusive, though the Tusk government doesn’t seem to care as they push Brussels to launch a major Polish shale gas exploitation program.

In China, shale gas looks about to take off as a major new focus for the country’s enormous energy requirements. The governing State Council has recently approved shale gas as an “independent mineral resource” and the Ministry of Land and Resources will conduct an appraisal of shale gas resources this year to expedite discovery and development of China shale deposits. Until now China’s rough mountainous terrain and lack of shale gas fracking know-how has kept it out of the shale gas, with coal far the major source of electric power. The French oil giant, Total, has just signed a deal with China’s Sinopec to produce shale gas in China. China has around 31 trillion cubic meters of natural gas trapped in shale, some 50% greater than the United States according to the US Department of Energy estimate.5 These are volumes to make the head of any respectable state official spin.

One exception to the shale gas rush is Germany where the Federal Government just decided to prohibit ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, from fracking in the eastern part of the country, stating they were “very skeptical” of industry claims it would not poison ground water or cause earthquake damage.6

Myth and reality: The Halliburton Loophole

Fracking techniques have been around since the end of World War II. Why then suddenly is the world going gaga over shale gas hydraulic fracking? One answer is the record high oil and gas prices of the recent few years have made the costly fracking profitable. The second reason is the advance of various horizontal underground drilling techniques that allow companies like Schlumberger to enter a large shale rock formation and inject substances to “free” the trapped gas.

But the real reason for the recent explosion of fracking in the country where it has most been applied, the United States, is the passage of legislation in 2005 by the US Congress that exempts the oil industry’s hydraulic fracking activity from regulatory supervision by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The oil and gas industry is the only industry in America that is allowed by EPA to inject known hazardous materials – unchecked – directly into or adjacent to underground drinking water supplies.7

The law is known as the “Halliburton Loophole.” That’s because it was introduced on massive lobbying pressure from the company that produces the lion’s share of chemical hydraulic fracking fluids – Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton. When he became Vice President under George W. Bush in early 2001, Bush immediately gave Cheney responsibility for a major Energy Task Force to make a comprehensive national energy strategy. Aside from looking at Iraq oil potentials as documents later revealed, Cheney’s task force used Cheney’s considerable political muscle and industry lobbying money to win exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act.8

During Cheney’s term as vice president he moved to make sure the Government’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would give a green light to a major expansion of shale gas drilling in the US. In 2004 the EPA issued a study of the environmental effects of fracking. That study has been called “scientifically unsound” by EPA whistleblower Weston Wilson. In March of 2005, EPA Inspector General Nikki Tinsley found enough evidence of potential mishandling of the EPA hydraulic fracturing study to justify a review of Wilson’s complaints. The Oil and Gas Accountability Project conducted a review of the EPA study which found that EPA removed information from earlier drafts that suggested unregulated fracturing poses a threat to human health, and that the Agency did not include information that suggests “fracturing fluids may pose a threat to drinking water long after drilling operations are completed.”9

The Halliburton Loophole is no minor affair. The process of hydraulic fracking to extract gas involves staggering volumes of water and of some of the most toxic chemicals known. During the uproar over the BP Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Obama Administration and the Energy Department formed an advisory commission on Shale Gas. Their report was released in November 2011. It was what could only be called a “whitewash” of the dangers of shale gas.

The commission was headed by former CIA director John Deuss. Deuss sits on the board of Citigroup, one of the world’s most active energy industry banks, tied to the Rockefeller family. He also sits on the board of Schlumberger, along with Halliburton, the major company doing hydraulic fracking. In fact, of the seven panel members, six had ties to the energy industry. Little surprise that the Deuss report called shale gas, “the best piece of news about energy in the last 50 years.” Deuss added, “Over the long term it has the potential to displace liquid fuels in the United States.”10

In the US oil industry people have forgotten the scare about oil and gas depletion, popularly known as the Peak Oil theory in their new euphoria over huge new volumes of gas and also oil obtained by fracking of shale and coal beds. Now even the Obama Administration is talking about a renaissance in domestic oil production. The reason is the dramatic rise in domestic extraction of gas from hydraulic fracking of shale, using new fracking techniques first developed by Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton, made financially lucrative with the advent of $100 a barrel oil since 2008. Reportedly under pressure from then Vice President Cheney, chemical or hydraulic fracking of shale rock and coal beds has been left unregulated under what has become known as the Halliburton Loophole in the 2005 US National Energy Bill.11

To access the gas, the shale needs to be fractured using a mixture of hot water, sand and chemical additives, some of which are highly poisonous. Attempts by citizen organizations and individual litigants to force oil services company disclosure of the composition of chemicals used in hydraulic fracking have met a stone wall of silence. The companies argue that the chemicals are proprietary secrets and that disclosing them would hurt their competitiveness. They also insist the process is “basically safe and that regulating it would deter domestic production.”12 This legal sleight of hand lets the fracking lobby have their cake and eat it too. They claim it is safe, refuse to say what chemicals are used and insist it be free from the Environmental Protection Administration rules under the Safe Drinking Water Act. If they are right about how safe their chemical fracking fluids are why are they afraid of regulation like other chemical companies?

To understand what is going on, in a typical shale gas fracturing operation, a company drills a hole several thousand meters below surface; then they drill a horizontal branch perhaps one kilometer in length. As one expert described the fracking, once the horizontal drilling into the shale formation is done, “you send down a kind of subterranean pipe bomb, a small package of ball-bearing-like shrapnel and light explosives. The package is detonated, and the shrapnel pierces the bore hole, opening up small perforations in the pipe. They then pump up to 7 million gallons of a substance known as slick water to fracture the shale and release the gas. It blasts through those perforations in the pipe into the shale at such force – more than nine thousand pounds of pressure per square inch – that it shatters the shale for a few yards on either side of the pipe, allowing the gas embedded in it to rise under its own pressure and escape.”13

The shale rock in which the gas is trapped is so tight that it has to be broken in order for the gas to escape. Therein come the problems. A combination of sand and water laced with chemicals – including benzene – is pumped into the well bore at high pressure, shattering the rock and opening millions of tiny fissures, enabling the shale gas to seep into the pipeline.

Not only does it liberate gas or in the case of Bakken, oil. It floods the shale formation with millions of gallons of toxic fluids. A study conducted by Theo Colburn, PhD, director of the Endocrine Disruption Exchange in Paonia, Colorado, identified 65 chemicals that are probable components of the fracking fluids used by shale gas drillers. These chemicals included benzene, glycol-ethers, toluene, 2-(2-methoxyethoxy) ethanol, and nonylphenols. All of those chemicals have been linked to health disorders when human exposure is too high.14 Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, D. C. Baum Professor of Engineering at Cornell University, who has researched fracture mechanics for more than 30 years, has said that drilling and hydraulic fracturing “can liberate biogenic natural gas into a fresh water aquifer.”15

Not only possibly poisoning the fresh water underground aquifers, hydraulic fracking is done with such force that it has been known to cause earthquakes. In the UK, Cuadrilla was doing shale gas drilling in Lancashire. They suspended their shale gas test drilling in June 2011, following two earthquakes – one tremor of magnitude 2.3 hit the Fylde coast on 1 April, followed by a second of magnitude 1.4 on 27 May.16 A UK Government study of the earthquakes, released in April concluded that the fracking drilling operations had caused the quakes.17 Earthquake activity in fracking regions across the US have also been reported.

Alarmingly, in the case of exploiting shale gas in China, the largest shale formation lies in Sechuan Province in China’s east, one of the most active earthquake zones in Asia. Additionally, given the documented dangers to ground water from extensive fracking, China’s chronic water shortages are threatened as well.

The new technique of hydraulic fracking was first used successfully in the late 1990s in the Barnett Shale in Texas, and is now being used to liberate oil from beneath the Bakken Shale in North Dakota. But the largest shale gas fracking activity in the US has been a literal gas bonanza drilling boom in the Marcellus Shale that runs from West Virginia into upstate New York, estimated estimated to hold as much gas as the whole United States consumes in a century.18 More recent estimates put the figure at half that or lower, suggesting the energy industry is using hype to promote its methods.

Good news bad news

Good news is shale gas shows how wrong the peak oil lobby is about depletion of global hydrocarbons. Gas like coal and oil are according to their definition all “fossil fuels.” While we leave aside whether in fact they are from dinosaur detritus or fossilized algae, clearly the Earth is far from peaking in its hydrocarbon resources. Bad news is diverting valuable resources from finding abundant conventional gas or oil using advanced new methods.